This invention relates generally to temperature sensing food cooking apparatus. In a preferred embodiment, the present invention is a portable hamburger press with one or more temperature probes to sense internal temperatures of hamburger patties as the patties are being cooked.
Food safety is an important issue to both the food service industry and consumers. This is especially true with regard to ground beef products, such as hamburgers, which can contain active pathogens if not adequately cooked. To ensure that a hamburger patty, for example, has been adequately cooked would require sensing the internal temperature of the patty and cooking it until a known safe temperature (e.g., 165.degree. F.) is sensed.
Although the issues of food safety and safe cooking temperatures have been known, it has been cost prohibitive and operationally infeasible to measure each and every patty's internal temperature directly. Consequently, food service industry attempts to assure ground beef food safety have focused on controlling the relationship between cooking temperature and time because this has been perceived to be more operationally compatible. This approach attempts to provide a statistical assurance that if one cooks ground beef at a certain temperature for long enough, proper internal temperatures will be obtained. This relies on statistical averages rather than on actual direct measurement of food item temperature for each food item cooked.
Because of the inevitable variations in patty composition and cooking temperatures, the aforementioned indirect approach cannot assure that each and every patty will obtain the proper internal temperature. One attempt to overcome this shortcoming is for restaurants to overcook their products to try to assure reaching safe internal temperatures. Overcooking has its own shortcomings in that customers typically do not prefer overcooked food.
To avoid having to overcook and yet to ensure adequately cooked food, there is the need for an improved food cooking apparatus which enables direct sensing of internal food temperature without being cost prohibitive or operationally infeasible.